A two-pronged campaign

A Lessig campaign would have two dimensions: process and policy. The "process" dimension, which Lessig elaborates in a video (in Lessig's signature pithy, PowerPoint style) posted at his newly-launched proto-campaign site, is an outgrowth of his latest academic project: the study of money's corrupting influence on politics. His goal here is to "fundamentally alter the incentives legislators face as they're trying to do their jobs."

Pondering a run

One simple means of reducing the political power of campaign cash, Lessig says, "could be done tomorrow." He wants to ban legislative earmarks, those juicy morsels of targeted federal funding legislators direct toward pet projects and political supporters. Lessig also hopes to encourage more robust public financing of campaigns, noting the salutary effect such policies appear to be having in states like Maine and Arizona. Most immediately—and perhaps most radically—Lessig says he will swear off contributions from lobbyists or political action committees, and he hopes to bring grassroots pressure to bear on other candidates to follow suit. (Prospective opponent Jackie Speier, he notes in passing in his online video, does accept such contributions.)

"This is about building a parallel to Creative Commons in Congress," Lessig explains, referencing the popular legal license he created to help authors and artists make their work available for free distribution and modification. Just as creators under a Creative Commons license cede some control over their works in order to promote a robust open-source culture, Lessig's political vision entails "people in power, legislators, voluntarily waiving that power in order to build a better system." If politicians begin foreswearing PAC money, the theory runs, voters may come to see the failure to refuse lobbyist dollars as a badge of shame rather than simply the way things are done.

Policy prescriptions

On the policy front, Lessig happily allows that there isn't a whole lot of daylight between himself and Speier on issues like healthcare or the war in Iraq. "I'm a liberal Democrat," he says, though he adds that he is "a free-trade, pro-market liberal." (Since California's 12th runs deep, deep blue, the winner of the Democratic primary is all but guaranteed victory in the general election.) Instead, Lessig would set himself apart by making technology the centerpiece of his campaign.

"Silicon Valley needs a representative who can speak for the interests of the Internet, of making it flourish," he says. "As we're leading into this moment when the owners of telecommunications platforms are trying to leverage their ownership into control of the Internet, yammering about the need to turn it into the old Bell System, we need someone in Washington who's going to be able to stare them down."

But while Lessig wryly notes that the RIAA and MPAA "won't be excited to have an opponent of extremist copyright legislation in Congress," he also stresses that a congressional run would not be some kind of crusading extension of his work on "free culture." For Lessig, the central policy question will be, "Who ultimately controls innovation on the Internet? That's the net neutrality fight; that's the open spectrum fight."

One obstacle to such innovation is the Federal Communications Commission, which "was established in order to protect the incumbents," and may now need to be "restructured to facilitate competition." As an example, Lessig points to recent spectrum policy, which he describes as "extremely disappointing." According to Lessig, "circa 2001, the basic lesson we had learned is that we had undervalued unlicensed spectrum, that we didn't understand its innovation potential. Everyone was adopting the view that we needed more unlicensed areas alongside more spectrum auctions."

But in the intervening years, he says that "lobbyists have been very effective at changing the conversation, at making the property model seem like the only model"—a trend Lessig believes has enriched a few spectrum owners at the expense of overall economic growth.

Stepping out of the ivory tower

But why should an already-influential academic celebrity hailed as the father of his field trade his department chair for a seat in Congress, where he would be just one of 435 votes?

Lessig says he began considering the prospect after a member of the audience at one of his recent lectures asked him why he wasn't doing something about the problem of political corruption—a challenge that struck home. But he admits there's also a practical angle. "When I was doing free culture stuff, there were hundreds of fora every year where people wanted to talk about these issues. There are no industry conferences on political corruption, and I quickly realized this was going to be harder to talk about than I had expected."

Finally, there's what sounds like a bit of a perfectionist streak in the equation. "It would be painful to watch other people try to solve the problems I'm talking about and do it wrong," Lessig says.

Of course, all this will be—pardon the phrase—academic unless Lessig can stage an upset against Jackie Speier, a seasoned politician who has already lined up the support of some of California's most prominent Democrats. Speier has the support of both the state's representatives in the US Senate: San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom and the late Rep. Lantos himself. Lessig points out, however, that those endorsements were "given when nobody thought anyone else was running," and suggests that the "rush to consolidate" before a field of contenders has emerged is creating frustration among voters who would prefer a few more options.

With only weeks remaining before the special election, Lessig says he'll make a definite decision about whether to run by the beginning of March. If he does, he'll have to push his distributed network of supporters to the limit in order to get his campaign out of beta on time.